ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Guns Do Kill People

The loss of two young lives, in the same room, by the same hand, within a span of a few years, should jolt every parent in Orange County to take up the cause of preventing the unsafe storage of firearms in the home.

It’s hard to conceive of circumstances offering a more compelling argument before the court of public opinion than is offered in the case of Richard H. Bourassa Jr., 18, sentenced last Friday to 18 years to life in prison.

He’s going to prison because he had easy access to a gun in the home. It’s obvious that guns that are not securely stored pose a great risk, especially to children and teens. Bourassa is living proof of that--as a minor he used his parents’ gun in both shootings.

Dale Bush and Richard Wiedepuhl, parents of two youths slain by Bourassa under remarkably similar circumstances, sat side by side in Orange County Superior Court last Friday. They heard Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald give Bourassa the maximum punishment for second-degree murder in the shooting death of Christian Wiedepuhl in 1990; police had ruled the killing of Jeffrey Bush four years earlier an accident. But there was small consolation for survivors of gunplay. Nor, for that matter, is there ever much that can be said to any survivors of tragic shootings in the home. In this case, there was only the certainty that a strong message was delivered by a judge.

And what of Bourassa’s parents? His mother, Nancy Baldwin, and the stepfather, Thomas Baldwin, were duly criticized by a Probation Department report for “extremely poor judgment” in keeping loaded weapons in the home after the first shooting. They, too, have suffered for this gross oversight, and told probation authorities that their marriage was on the rocks since the second shooting.

A loaded, accessible gun in the home can mean that everybody loses. Parents who don’t secure their firearms should understand that they are, in effect, doing what prosecutors said of Bourassa--that he was playing a form of Russian roulette when a live round fired and killed Wiedepuhl. Russian roulette is an appropriate image to burnish in the minds of careless parents.